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It’s been a month since news broke that Venoco Energy was using controversial “fracking” techniques to harvest crude oil from Los Alamos wells. This week, very much in response to that news, which caught regulatory agencies off guard, the county supervisors held an informational hearing on hydraulic fracturing. “Our primary concern,” explained Supervisor Doreen Farr, “is any effect [the fracking] might have on the groundwater, especially for Los Alamos.”

To that end, Doug Anthony, deputy director of County Planning and Development, provided the supes with a report detailing controversies and environmental concerns surrounding the oil-extraction technique. (“Fracking” involves fracturing underground shale surrounding an oil well and injecting a chemical/water/sand mixture into the cracks to help facilitate the flow of oil.) Anthony also addressed the many regulatory agencies involved, the oil industry’s opinion on the topic, and the various bits of pending legislation at the state and the federal levels geared to get a better handle on fracking and mitigate any potential environmental nastiness (generally related to water tables being polluted) associated with the process.

The public also turned up on Tuesday, the vast majority of them — which included residents from Los Alamos and representatives from several enviro outfits — speaking out against the use of fracking. In the end, the supes continued the discussion, but not before certain members voiced grave concern about the potential pitfalls of the oil removal process and the apparent lack of current oversight and understanding.

Interestingly enough, county staff had issued two Notice of Violations (NOV) to Venoco for alleged infringements of Land-Use Development Code as it pertains to the two now-fracked wells after hearing about the fracking and doing a bit of investigation late last month. (Some of Tuesday’s testimony came from people whose leased properties were fracked without their knowing it.) Venoco, for its part, reports that while the fracking has stopped and the company has no immediate plans to resume it, they did nothing wrong in the first place and, as such, their lawyers have formally requested that the NOVs be dropped.

The fracking discussion is scheduled to continue at the Board of Supervisors on August 2 when a representative from the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources will be present to answer questions.

Comments

Please go out and rent the movie Gasland. Check out how the bush/cheney folks got the chemicals used for fracking expempt from reporting requirements of the CWA. Now if there is suspicion of groundwater contamination the oil companies don't have to divulge what chemicals they use, which is a lot of nasty ones, and therefore it makes it tough to correlate thier activities directly with the contamination. Check out the folks in PA who had the property adjacent to them "frac'd" and now their water well, which was drinkable for decades now spits out natural gas and they can physically light a flame right out of the kitchen spicot. Halliburton claims they were not responsible. Also note that methane is a far more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Can you tell me that these guys can frack the heck out of our subsurface and capture all that methane with none of it escaping to the atmsosphere?

Gasland is a movie for people who can't make up their own minds. The producer assumes we are incapable of thinking for ourselves, so he feeds us what he wants us to believe. Just like Fox - balanced news (ha ha ha). So now we have a bunch of oil and gas "experts", trained by a producer with an agenda. Sorry, there's much to the story that Gasland leaves out.

Check out what Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, had to say on May 24, 2011:

"The head of the Environmental Protection Agency told a House committee Tuesday that she favored natural gas production and said she didn't know of any “proven case” in which hydraulic fracturing had affected drinking water."

junk science is building a machine that runs on fuel that requires you to rape the earth in order to extract it, then spew it back into the atmosphere when the energy conversion is done. If 'fracking'(curse word to those in space) isn't so bad, why did the company proceed w/o telling anybody? Seems like our local govt isn't bought and paid for yet. Hopefully what happens in DC stays in DC and someday we take it back from what is now a corporate plutocracy.

I guess, spacey, that you are them guilty of raping the earth every time you drive somewhere, every time you get on a plane, every time you use plastics (including when you posted the above response), and every time you patronize any business that uses fossil fuels to assemble and deliver their products and services to a place you can buy them... which means every time you eat something.

Gasland is a very good documentary but it leads the viewer to suspect that everytime fracking occurs it leads to groundwater contamination which clearly isn't the case. At the same time it is clear that there have definitely been proven cases where fracking directly resulted in groundwater contamination. This is a relatively new process and if properly regulated could be a win-win for both sides, but that isn't the case right now, it's like the wild west in some states regarding the lax regulations. The head of the EPA is such an abysmal failure of a person.

Gasland is a very poor "documentary." In fact, I wouldn't even call it a documentary, I'd call it a political statement made by someone who has absolutely no technical experience or expertise in his subject matter. Josh Fox may be well meaning, but he doesn't know what he's talking about. His film been refuted by the EPA, by the State of Colorado, the State of Pennsylvania, and by researchers in West Virginia. It's junk science to be sure, but in this case politically correct junk science. The same folks who decry climate change deniers embrace this brand of junk science uncritically, because it's sufficiently ideologically pure.

I'm going to repeat what I posted above:On May 24, Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, told a House committee that she favored natural gas production and said she didn't know of any “proven case” in which hydraulic fracturing had affected drinking water."

Can you provide evidence to show that she is wrong? And credentials to demonstrate that you are more qualified than she is?

Fracking is not a new process, and neither is it even "relatively new." It was introduced in the 1940's, and since then hundreds of thousands of wells have been fracked all over the US.

^Wrong and wronger. You believe someone just because they hold a temporary government position that they were appointed to by the president? You clearly have very little knowledge about fracking. Try talking to someone in the industry. The practice known as fracking today was developed in the 90's, not the 40's.

OK, fracking has been around for a while, since the 40's, but it has been recently developed to a much greater extent so it can go further underground, thereby endangering our water supply.(Over 12,000 feet) There are plenty of documented reports of wells that formerly supplied clean water that now supply contaminated water due to fracking in the area.“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.

Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.

Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.